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The Community Roundtable

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The Evolution of Customer Communities

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In 2021, online communities are table stakes for brands that want to connect and engage with their audience.

Community professionals are now handed the task of not just connecting with a brand’s audience, but deciding what kind of engagement is needed, and how to build a long-term strategy to foster and maintain that activity.

Today, customer communities typically fall into one or more of three core categories: support communities, brand marketing communities, and innovation communities.

We partnered with Khoros to explore these three community types, and to look at how community professionals can make their customer communities more valuable to their brands.

This ebook takes new, unpublished data from the State of Community Management 2021 and looks at how online customer communities contribute to both audience engagement and satisfaction (like higher CSAT scores) and how they make a meaningful impact on the organizations broader goals.

The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities

In addition to this new, externally-focused data, we profile three innovative online communities, that are using their customer interactions to drive advocacy, empowerment, and innovation.

Download your copy of this State of Community Management eBook for free.

The Role of Communities in Innovation

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Communities play a critical role in innovation. Whether in the middle ages or now cities, in particular, are critical to innovation. Cities are a type of community that produces a high cadence of collisions between a diverse set of individuals. This collision of people and ideas allows people to converge on what is meaningful and interesting and then to find ways to scalably address the opportunities that arise from that meaning. The obvious current example is the innovation generated in Silicon Valley.

However, in the conversation around online communities and innovation, the connection to innovation is not as clearly understood. A lot of the discussion is focused on ideation and input. As someone with a background in innovation and product management, this represents only a tiny portion of innovation – and a tiny portion of the opportunity.

Emergence in the White Space

To better understand the connection, let’s consider how innovation happens. The front end of innovation starts with a feeling; a frustration about what is or excitement about what could be. It’s vague and unformed. These feelings are best expressed through art because they are still unarticulated. To me, this provocation to develop new sensibilities or understanding is the crucial difference between art and graphics or crafts. It’s the emergence of something new in the white space around what currently exists.

An example of this that I love, is how Billy Porter uses clothing to make an artistic statement. To me, this is an expression of frustration at current gender norms and expectations. It challenges us to think more broadly about what it means to be a man, a woman, or neither. It opens up space for something different.

Developing Shared Meaning

Once we have something expressed through art we can show it to others, discuss it, and together find the words to express its meaning. We can translate it into something more defined. We find words. We argue about them. We refine them.

I use art in workshops to help develop a shared perspective on things like culture and leadership, which many people find hard to articulate. Selecting images that represent those things and then having a conversation about if, how and why those images resonate helps people put more specific language to what feels vague and squishy. It also helps uncover divergent perspectives, which can reveal underlying issues or mindsets that are making progress hard.

As more and more people engage in developing shared meaning, it is absorbed into the culture and people’s mental models. It becomes normalized. This process requires dialog, trust, and relationships. The more frequent and deeper the discussions, the faster art transforms into meaning and then into concrete opportunities.

Norming and Optimizing

Addressing concrete opportunities allows something to become normalized, predictable and even routine. People have a shared understanding and expectations about how we interact with the new concept and the value it has. It becomes a pattern that can be applied again and again – a template.

Once a pattern is established, you can apply technology to the pattern so it can be optimized and repeated with a lot less effort. Critically, this also allows innovation to be measured, further optimizing it.

This is how innovation has always worked but it has been hard to see because translating something from emotion to language to patterns to metrics has often taken decades – especially if the innovation was complex and expensive and the value hard to understand.

As communications, collisions, and engagement have increased in speed thanks to the Internet and the global online community it created, the speed of innovation and adoption has fundamentally changed. Innovation gets initiated, understood, and translated into concrete and meaningful products and services within months.

This increase in adoption has largely been the unintentional benefit of people clustering naturally in online spaces to engage. However, in the past few years organizations are finally starting to see and optimize these networks – these communities – to explicitly pursue learning, change, and innovation. One great example of that is the community ecosystem at ESRI, a geographic data company that works with a huge range of industries and applications, all of whom are developing unique ways to realize value from its data. By intentionally structuring and managing the community, its partners can access, learn, and develop solutions more quickly, accelerating shared value for the entire ecosystem.

Capturing the Value of Innovation

Communities are, at their core, the way people have always come together to learn. They provide the space, relationships, collisions, and trust necessary to create shared meaning, to iterate on emergent ideas, and to norm new patterns and behaviors. Offline that complex system is hard to understand but now that many communities are online, we can see, measure, and optimize them.

We can also measure and project the value and speed of innovation, through engagement in communities. In the 2019 State of Community Management research, we found that the growth in engagement and value of communities closely matches the innovation S curve. The implication is that the better an organization can foster, develop and sustain communities, the better they will be at rapidly turning market frustrations and insights into opportunities and then into solutions.

The Link Between Communities and Innovation

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Innovation is always a hot-button topic in the technology world – but what about in community management? Besides the use of an innovative technology how can community managers and social business strategists help their organizations to be more innovative?

Last week we shared this presentation, focused on how communities can be powerful tools for product teams in driving innovation.


Communities for Innovation from The Community Roundtable

In addition to some of the great advice contained above I wanted to share some articles we’ve seen recently that provide insight on how to be make innovation part of your daily routine – not just something you think about at a company retreat or during your annual review.

This post by Haydn Shaughnessy is titled “How to Measure Innovation” but really does a great job outlining the idea of defining appropriate metrics and skills that lead to innovative outputs. He highlights community and social business as one of these main skill sets, saying, “To be good at innovation a company needs more than social media presence – it needs to be good at bringing customers into a collaborative relationship and keeping them there”.

Another great post for framing innovation for community managers is from Forbes: “6 Tips On Driving Innovation – Even If You Think Your Boss Will Say No.” The author outlines six ways to get started innovating at large companies. They may seem fairly obvious as you read them: de-risk your ideas, get out of the office, don’t expect everyone to say yes – but they provide a great checklist to review from time to time. Innovation can happen in small ways everyday and taking the advice to heart can help you re-shape the way you think about innovating and make it a daily practice.

Finally, I wanted to share a post that I find helpful in both self-evaluation and in brainstorming effectively. To be a true driver of innovation you must do more than just think innovative thoughts. These five questions to build an innovative culture are a great exercise to complete alone, or with your community team. The seven-step program for innovating right now that Tim includes at the end is a great framework for strength-testing ideas for wider consumption and acceptance and is a helpful jumping off point for anyone that wants to be more innovative, but isn’t sure how.

Have you been thinking about how to be more innovative with your community programs? Have a great innovation resource I missed? I’d love to hear how you’re approaching being a more innovative community manager – and to hear examples the innovative ways you’re connecting with you communities.

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